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Thursday, July 28, 2016

Page o' coordination: displacing a jazz groove

As the heading on the page says, this is a fairly ill-advised endeavor we're covering today: displacing a jazz groove, by shifting the cymbal and hihat rhythm over to the last note of the triplet. Not exactly a core thing. Jeff Watts very audaciously did it on Branford Marsalis's album Trio Jeepy. I also think it was covered in a book I don't own, Gavin Harrison's How To Crash The Band And Get Fired, For The Soon-To-Be-Formerly-Professional Drummer.

I'm sorry, I don't know where I got that. The title of that book is Rhythmic Illusions. Listen: I wrote this just to mess with one particular bass player I work with, a strong player who likes to fool around playing the middle of the triplet— which I take as a compliment, that he is comfortable enough playing with me to do that. Maybe it will end up helping the music go someplace new and special, or maybe it'll just be me messing with him briefly. Probably the only reason a normal person will want to do this is just to refine the internals of your jazz feel by shifting perspective. In that way it's a reasonable technical exercise, worth spending a few hours with.

Do our standard left hand moves— my full CSD! workout is to play each exercise 2, 4, or 8 times with each of those moves. You'll need to work closely with a metronome on this, and it's an excellent idea to count the quarter notes out loud, too; you never want to be guessing where the beat actually is.